I always like Sameer Patel’s posts. I do not always agree. As in this case. The 90’s will not come back. Customers manage their relations, often regarding their contacts with their service providers as mere encounters. And yes, service (even professional services to a certain extent) has become a commodity for your customer.

In another article — Social CRM: An Introduction — I talked about what we mean by social CRM and tried to come up with a workable definition.

If you’re coming at this from a CRM-centric mindset (which I am), a good way to think of social CRM is that it considers information in the various social media as meta-data about your customers and potential customers. In Dynamics CRM terms, this very quickly leads to concrete thinking as follows:

Leads = “potential customers”

Accounts and Contacts = “customers”

If you’re just getting started with social CRM, it’s best to keep it simple at first, so here I’ll describe possibly the Simplest Ever customization of the Dynamics CRM contact